Hikvision’s Built-in NVR Like Capabilities

I’ve been asked what cameras can record without the need for an NVR or a PC running NVR software. In the past I’ve recommended Mobotix which has solid in-camera NVR capabilities but sometimes the price of these cameras and complexity have been a barrier to many.

Hikvision cameras also have this capability and is probably one of the best implementations I’ve seen once it’s setup, but there isn’t good documentation on how to do this, so I put together this tutorial.

Let me first show you how it works so you get an idea if it’s the right solution for you.

When video is recorded by the camera to a NAS, you can play the video by logging into the camera via your browser. I tested it with Internet Explorer 10 and Firefox 22.

You click on the Playback tab across the top and you’ll see a screen like this

Across the bottom are the play/pause button, stop button, and speed control buttons on the left and buttons to take snapshot and download recorded events on the right.

Double clicking on the video will bring it up in full screen mode. Double click or hit escape to get back. With e-PTZ enabled (the magnifying glass), when in full screen mode, you can highlight and area of the screen with your mouse and it magnifies the area, clicking on the screen returns to the full display.

The timeline below the buttons is where you find recorded video. You basically drag the timeline under the yellow line and click play. It plays from clip to clip until you hit stop or pause. You can expand the timeline period to get finer control by clicking the plus/minus signs on the right.

This all works smoothly and as well as most NVR’s out there. You can select another date from the calendar and select a start time below that.

To download a video recording, you can click on the download button and it will present a list of all recordings and you can select them and click start and it will download the video from the NAS to your computer

So now that you know how it works, I’ll go into the nitty gritty. The first step is to make sure you have the latest firmware version. I had trouble getting this to work until I upgraded to V5 firmware for this camera.

The next step is setting up your NAS for NFS. To clarify, NAS means Network Attached Storage and means the disk is connected via your network. NFS is a file sharing protocol, Network File System. Most cheap NAS devices are setup for Windows/Mac only and use CIFS share or FTP protocols. This will not work with either, it has to support NFS. I first tried it with a WD MyBook Live which has NFS secretly installed on some models, but it did not work. I used Synology Diskstation and that worked. You can probably use FreeNFS software on Windows and for those with a MAC, you OSX has NFS built in, just have to set it up.

Log into the camera via a browser and click on Configuration, Advanced Configuration, Storage and click on the NAS tab. Then type in the IP address of the NAS and then the directory name of the NAS directory (this directory is created when you setup NFS).

When you click Save, it will ask you for a reboot, wait about a minute and the camera logs you back in automatically at the same point. Then click on the Storage Management tab.

If all went well with the last step, you’ll see your NAS drive with it’s capacity. Click the checkbox next to it and click the Format button. This is a misnomer as it does not really format your disk. If you have data on there, it will not erase it. All it does it builds some sort of metadata on the volume that doesn’t really take up much space.

As a warning, depending on the size of your drive, the speed of your NAS, this can take a while, maybe 30 minutes. It will provide it’s progress on the right in terms of percentage done and when it’s done, the Status should show normal and you should see Free space. I would reboot the camera because this is where my WD Mybook failed, it said Normal but changed to “uninitialized” after rebooting the camera. With the Synology it stayed Normal.

Now click on the Record Schedule tab

Here you have to click the Edit button and enter in your recording schedule for motion detection. If you do it correctly and you want to be able to always record, the schedule will be all green. The easiest way is to put in 00:00 to 24:00 and click Select All, click Copy and OK.

Now the NAS portion has been setup. If you did not make it this far, it could be your camera firmware or NAS is not correct.

Under Configuration, Advanced Configuration, Events, select the Motion Detection tab and check the checkboxes circled in yellow and the click the button circled in yellow to set motion detect area and the schedule (same screen as above).

If you did everything correctly, it should be set to record on the next motion detection. So stand in front of the camera and “wave our hands in the air like you just don’t care” as the song goes and click on the Playback tab, scroll the timeline to the current time and see if there’s a recording. You can also log into the NAS and see if there are any recordings.

Kudos to Hikvision for putting all this functionality in an affordable camera. For Hikvision to make this perfect, they would need to support CIFS as that’s more common and is password protected where NFS is not. This would allow most people to buy a cheap off the shelf $100 NAS and start using it to record.

This makes sense if you have a small amount of cameras like 1 or 2 and buying an NVR is not practical. Once you have a more significant amount of cameras, logging on to each camera to view recordings may be tedious and may be time to get an NVR or NVR software.

Hi all new to posting here but have learned a great deal from this great blog. Thank you all especially the man known as Buellwinkle ;).

I have a system consisting of two Hikvision DS-2CD2532F-IS Mini domes and two Swann/Hikvision 3mp Bullets (which I chose on your recommendation) running through a POE switch to a dedicated NVR PC running Sighthound Video. The image quality is AMAZING!

I’m a computer geek with limited networking knowledge and previously zero ip cam knowledge so it’s been a journey of discovery, thanks for the support. Couldn’t have done it with out you guys.

I recently had an incident which was captured by my cams. I posted capture of the incident to our neighborhood watch. The response was overwhelming. We have over 400 members in our neighborhood watch and I have received numerous requests to install cameras at their homes. I would be happy to do this but would like to avoid tearing up their walls. Hikvision has just released a budget WIFI NVR. The DS-7104NI-SL/W. Here is a link to the product page;

If you could find time to review this NVR I would be forever in your debt!

Also I have found the “people finder” function in Sighthound Video to be very very effective at reducing false motion notifications (although Sighthound has many rough edges (Won’t live stream at full screen on Android app, won’t playback at over 1080p in firefox, will playback at high resolution in Chrome but won’t live stream) too bad, the people finder feature is amazing. You should do a review of Sighthound too! Have I thrown enough work at you yet!

Sighthound, formerly VitaminD is pretty cool software. As with any analytics, there’s a price to be paid in CPU use but they are working on that and getting better all the time. I wanted to do a review, just need them to provide the software to do the review as I tried the demo software, but it’s limited to low resolution. If you talk to them, tell them to let me know if they are willing as I am.

Will take a look at that NVR. It’s available via a U.S. distributor, but said special order, which means they don’t have inventory and I would have to wait to get, but I’ll give it a shot. What may be in the same price ball park is the Intel NUC I recently did a review on. I bet for $250 including a 1TB hard drive, you can get the Celeron version and run 4 cameras using free software like Hikvision iVMS4200 or Milestone XProtect Go. I’ll have to try that too.

For the Events/Motion Detection/Linkage Method/ Upload to FTP, does that upload the motion-triggered jpeg snapshot?
If so, does it have a specific number of frames pre-/post- event included in the upload?
Will it continue to upload snapshots for the full duration of a motion event?
thanks again for your thorough reviews.

I tried the FTP feature. It’s working great but is limited. It will take 1 pictures every 2 seconds, you can set it up to 1 sec, but it will still take 1 every 2 secs and it will start when the motion is detected, not before.

How taxing is this on your computer, and what system are you running it on? I am very interested in their bullets and domes, but I am afraid my older i3 can’t handle BI. Any chance you are going to review the comparable Hik dome?

Great write up! I have 2 of these cameras and was wondering if you found a way for the timeline to display motion detection when you also have it set to record continuously. I can only get it to show either pink (motion detected) or blue (continuous recording) but not blue with pink overlayed to show the motion detection within the continuous write like Blue Iris would. If I can get this to work this would be the perfect solution. I have 2 cameras writing over NFS to my home server and CPU utilization is 1%! Much better than the 95% with Blue Iris.

I tried that. I think . Again my knowledge of BSD is limited. I setup a mount point /sidewalk on partition 1. Then I set up a second mount point /driveway. When I try to apply the change is returns this

Well it looks like the issue resolved itself. I have both cameras pointing to the same share volume. Maybe because of the size of the drive it took a long time to realize it was formatted by the other camera? I don’t know for sure. I don’t know if having both cameras to the same share is a good idea or not. I will run it for a few days and see how it goes. Right now it is working so I really don’t want to mess with it.

Yup, created 2 NFS shares called cam1 and cam2. On each camera I used /cam1 and /cam2 respectively as the NFS path. Both shares are on the same drive and the camera was able to “format” them. When it does a format, it lays down a directory structure so does not really format the drive but rather just initializes the file structure. I hope this helps.

Sounds like its an issue with how I have nas4free setup then. I guess I will pull the drive and totally wipe it and try again. Weird that one share shows 1.8TB and the other shown 0. When I format the drive on the other camera, that one shows 1.8TB and the previous camera now shows zero.

Just an update on the whole sharing/formatting issue. Turns out that it didn’t like both cameras to the same share. I called Hikvision and they confirmed they were having some issues with NAS boxes and were working on a firmware fix. However while troubleshooting we stumbled on a possible problem. The setup is a laptop running NAS4FREE with a 2TB external HDD. When I “formatted” the drive from the camera, it allocated all 1.8TB for storage, thus leaving no room for the other camera. I was having issues setting up a second partition using UFS file system, so I reformatted to ZFS and created to virtual partitions at .89TB and pointed each camera to a NFS share. Probably not the best or most efficient way to do it, but it works.

I had the share thing figured out I thought, but in the end I could only get it to see one drive. I called Hikvision and the guy there said there were some issues with direct NAS recording, and they were working on it. But during the conversation we figured that it was the way the cameras were “formatting” the drives. It seems that it would allocate all 1.8TB for one camera, thus leaving no room for the other. I wasn’t able to figure out how to create a second partition in UFS so I reformatted to ZFS and was able to create two volumes, both at .89TB each. Now each camera has its own partition. Probably not the best or most efficient way to do it, but its working.

So I’ve been running 2 cameras writing video trigger by motion to a nas4free server. I have one share folder then inside I have a folder created for each camera. They are both recording to their respective folder perfectly. I can either browse the files and watch the video or log into the camera and watch it. I didn’t create a partition for each camera.

Any updates on this? I have just installed two Hikvision cameras (a 4332 and a 2432) and it would be nice to record continuously yet show motion detection events. I have yet to purchase a NVR.

My old analog Q-See DVR also broke up the recording files based on motion detection. This made it really easy to view and/or download the clips including the motion detection events. Any idea if the Hikvisions can be setup to do this?

Hikvision makes cameras with SD card slots, but I have not tested any. Many Axis cameras do and then you use Axis Camera Companion to view the recordings. Just about all Mobotix cameras do and you can view the recordings from the cameras. Some cameras like ACTi with SD card slots require you to export the recordings to your PC to play back. Some like Dahua require you to run their program (PSS) to play recordings back.

Many cameras let you FTP, the issue is managing the disk. With FTP, it cannot return the amount of disk space available, so it typically just stops working when it’s full. Also, can Foscam playback directly from the camera via the browser interface?

Hi thanks for the write-up, I only wish this was done a few months ago when I was in the process of connecting the camera to my NAS, i’m sure it would have saved me a lot of time!

I am hoping someone here can help me with one little issue though, which hasn’t been mentioned yet… How can I set the camera to record only the last X amount of days, or even record to X amount of space, then overwrite from the start, when using the ‘in built’ nvr/nas capabilities. There does not seem to be any option for this on the NAS settings page…

I can do this with a vivotek camera (fd8134) which I have, but surprisingly not with the Hikvision (which so I have found to be far far superior in every other way to the similarly priced fd8134).

I started on this project Months ago, it took that long to get it working and that’s with Hikvision working on it with me. I have not found a place where you can specify the amount of days to record or X amount of space. But send them an email request, the more people that request it, the more likely it will get done. As a workaround, you may be able to set quota limits or define the amount of space for an NFS mount point that limit how much it can write before it has to erase older recordings.

Very late reply, but just in case you eventually see this…
Have you tried creating a custom user just for the Hikvision camera on your NAS, and then setting a quota for that user?

I had to go the quota route just to get the camera to work with the NAS. A nice side effect is that I can set it low enough to do what you want, sort of. What I can’t do, though, is have a continuous recording with a 3 day limit, let’s say, but also keep motion triggered events for longer.

I have iVMS4200 installed but have not played with it. Each camera that records directly to NFS requires you to log in separately to view live or recorded video. Can be tedious if you want to see what’s going on around your property at one time or playback from several cameras in unison.

I imagine your cameras have long since arrived and you already have your answer by now, but fooling around with IVMS-4200 and a mixture of Hikvision and foreign cameras is so far giving me the impression it does not work with other manufacturers cameras, regardless of ‘onvif’ standard compliance. This makes sense I guess, as otherwise they’d be providing an NVR package to the world free of Milestone-style license fees and potentially assisting folks who just bought a pile of cameras from the competition.

I’m not done testing yet, but so far it’s looking like this is intentional.

Memory is not an issue with BlueIris as it’s 32 bit app. Zoneminder can be installed either way. I have about 4 cameras on BlueIris on an i3-540 and run about 30-40% CPU using direct to disc recording. Zoneminder would be less efficient than BlueIris. Another choice is Milestone XProtect, free for 8 cameras for 5 days recordings, or $50/cam for their Essential version where you can have more cameras and more days of recording but uses a lot less CPU than BlueIris or Zoneminder and has good smartphone apps that are free. Don’t know how my i3 and your PC’s compare but there’s sites that compare CPU power.

I am in the market for a low to mid range network camera mainly to do continuous recording where there are fast moving objects. My essential criteria:
-outdoor (IP66/7)
-good low light performance (IR illumination is not really necessary but may come in useful)
-H264/Mpeg4
-SD card (a full blown NVR is not required – raw files will do)
-30fps 720p (at 1080p would be a bonus)
-low power (<12w preferably)
-secure connectors
-can be easliy mounted on a pole

The fewer moving parts the better so a fixed lens H=60 degrees would be adequate. Other than that wifi and/or a 4g module would be a bonus.

A Hikivision would be great but I cannot find an appropraite model with SD recording. I really like Acti cameras for quality/value and they have a nice API (URL commands) but seems that one must pay alot to get a model with SD recording in which case I would fork out for a Mobotix M24Sec.
At the moment I am considering Dahau/Q-See however I would be prepared to pay just a little more for crispier image quality.

Also do you have anything on Lilin. I was Looking briefly at the LR7722x but I am unsure. I have also not examined Axis.

I would really appreciate your opinion on this and thank you for this great site.

Dahua IPC-HFW3200C or 3300C has SD card slots and their new firmware allows for playback from camera like Hikvision. The ACTi outdoor domes have SD card slots. We certainly use Mobotix with SD card slots for remote locations. Axis P33 domes have SD card slots. There are Hikvision cameras with SD card slots but have never seen them in person.

As for pole mounts, ACTi, Axis, Mobotix should have pole mounts for many of their cameras. For Hikvision or Dahua, haven’t seen any but maybe generic pole mounts can be used.

Thank you for the helpful guide, just want to share something I did similar to NAS recording but using iVMS4200…I helped one client with the issue of 1 or 2 cameras per location, but multiple location, where it wasn’t budget friendly to use a NVR per location.

The things we used:
Hardware:
Windows Server PC that is left on all the time (he remotes into this PC with his company’s VPN to see playback on iVMS4200)
2 x 2 TB HD (installed into the PC)
12 cameras, about 6 locations. (Also connected with company VPN)

Basically all the cameras from 6 locations are recording to the 2 x 2 TB HD on the PC (thanks to the software), and the cameras can be grouped and set up and playback together with iVMS 4200.

If you do not have a company VPN, you can even port forward the camera, add the external IP of the camera to the computer with iVMS4200 storage software running, and do remote storage through the internet to one central location. The settings are a bit tricky though (especially for motion recording), and PCNVR software seem to die once in a while and has to be restarted, so hoping they keep releasing a stable version of this in the future.

I would try this with a new HD connected to your motherboard, I really am not sure if partitioning your HD will work. In theory it should.

-I will assume you have already imported all the cameras under Device Management under a single group-.

(always Save after each setting, this is also assuming for Motion Record)
1. Run storage server software, leave on.
2. run client software.
3. Control panel->Storage server
4. Click ‘Add’, and under IP, put the IP of your computer. User is admin, pw is 12345, port I kept as 8000. The serial of the PCNVR should show up.
5. Click Remote Configuration:
-Go to HDD->format your new HD.
-Click camera->add all three cameras from your group
-Click Schedule->Record Schedule needs to be set to All Day Template, repeat for all your cameras.
6. Back to Control Panel->Camera Setting
-Go to Schedule
-Local Recording should be checked automatically
-Record Schedule should be on Alarm Template
-Storage Server Recording should have your PCNVR’s Nickname on it.
7. Go to Motion Detection
– Should be enabled
-Sensitivity should be 3-4 (up to you)
-Arming Schedule here should be All-day Template

-I had ‘Triggered Camera’ checked, but don’t know if it made a difference.

Repeat for all your cameras, some settings you can do ‘Copy to’

To do playback:
Control panel->remote playback->select all the cameras you want to playback and click search then play, you will see the graph and stuff on the bottom.

Issues I’m still trying to find solutions for:
-Remote playback of the storage server using another computer in another location.
-Seeing all the cameras at once on Phone.
-Remote playback of the storage server on phone.

Good morning,
Well, I am happy to report that my system is up and running as it should (more or less) in part thanks to all the information I have been able to peruse here. I am still having one issue though. Let’s hope you’ve ran into it as well. Specs are:
- PC running Windows 7 Ultimate, 64 Bit
- 8 Hikvision DS-CD2032-I
- Synology DS-213 (2 bays, 3TB each)
- Blue Iris full product (licensed)

My setup, as I said, works perfectly… as long as it is saving to a local drive. Now, I purchased this Synology DS with the sole purpose of storing my video surveillance files, so you can imagine the level of frustration I am experiencing. I have the HD space in my local drives, but my ideal setup is using this Synology because of all the nifty features (i.e. redundancy, hot-swapping, etc), but at the same time, I refuse to buying the license pack they want for surveillance. Will I be able to make this work for me as a dumb networked drive where I can simply drop my BVR files (or mp4, or WMV, whichever I pick)

I have Swann hd-820′s and would like to do the same thing mentioned in this article. They are running V4.0.9 130419 firmware but I can’t find the correct version on the link provided. I was going to set up a linux based NVR using Zone Minder, but can’t get the NAS to format properly. Any suggestions? Thanks.

Ok, the firmware installed and I configured the NAS ip and path, however when I go to configure the HDD, it gets to around 50% and says “HDD Initialization failed”. Sorry for all the questions and thanks for your help.

You may need to change the encoding on the NFS server. This happened to me as well when using my NFS on Windows 2012. The default NFS encoding was ANSI. When it was ANSI it would bomb out. I changed it to BIG5 and it worked perfect. I hope this helps.

How did you make it work with synology? What steps am I missing? I even downloaded FreeNFS and ran it on the client PC, to no avail. I am both: very happy with BlueIris, and very disappointed with Synology. If I could make it work, I’d be golden.

Thanks for the FTP idea though. I will keep trying and save that for last

Make sure your NFS server is using BIG5 encoding instead of ANSI. I think the hikvision cameras need BIG5 to work. It would not format the storage until I changed the encoding to BIG5. I used Windows 2012 built in NFS.

Like many others here I tried to have these cameras record straight to a NAS via NFS and did not succeed. I wasn’t too bummed out about it though, because I purchased 8 of these cameras, and quite frankly monitoring 8 cameras one by one is not the most efficient scenario, so I did not insist too much on that.
I like to have granular control over all devices in my network, so buying an NVR didn’t make much sense, plus we all know how hard it is to find a decent NVR solution that’s scalable (I plan on buying 2 more cameras, for indoors) and provides the features you want. Instead, I focused my efforts on an NVR software, and having this software save to my Synology NAS. BlueIris was the winner after much research. Here is what I did in that regard:

1-Create your share in Synology, making sure all NFS privileges and permissions are set right.

2-In the Windows client, navigate to Control Panel / Programs and Features / Turn Windows Features on or off. (this was available in Windows 7 Ultimate, not sure if all flavors of Windows 7 carry this tool)

3-Select Services for Network File System (NFS), install

Even though Microsoft will insist that you should never use Hard mounts (they claim is to avoid data corruption) you will have lots of trouble trying to write to a share that’s a soft mount. It will disconnect whenever it feels like it, thus preventing you from saving to that drive. So, when you install Services for Network File System in step 3, make sure you navigate to Start / All Programs / Administrative Tools / Services for Network File System / click it, right click Client for NFS, and select Use Hard Mount, before you even type step 4.

This has been working great for me. I turned an old PC into a NAS with NAS4FREE. My issue now is how do I get the camera to only keep so many days? I only have 100GB of storage to use and it gets filled after a few days.
Thanks!

Hey Notchy.
I have 2, but only have 1 setup at the moment. Still need to run the cable for the other.
I connected the second camera and I’m able to see both cameras using the Hikvision IVMS4200 software.
I don’t use the software though. Since I only have camera’s and am only using 1 right now I just log into the camera directly.

As mentioned in my prior post I took an old PC and am running NAS4Free on it so I wouldn’t have to go out and buy a nas. This has been working great. The camera records directly to the NAS and I can log into the camera as detailed in the article above to view the recordings.

This actually came in very handy yesterday when the police needed me to identify a kid that was scoping out a package on my neighbors porch.

please keep us posted when you get the second camera hooked up and recording. I am having a heck of a problem getting them both to record to the same share. I’m running NAS4FREE also. Today both cameras seem to be dropping HDD to record to. IDK if it’s cause I’m using ZFS and not UFS or what.

Hey Dave. So I hooked up my second camera to see if I would have the same issue as you.
I couldn’t get it to record. I took the “Security” directory on my NAS and then created 2 folders inside there. One for each camera. Now neither one would record.

Messed with permissions. Nothing. Deleted folders and started over. Nothing. I then remembered under Services > NSF I had to setup the share. Did that and now the second would record, but not the first.

I played around and then by changing the ‘Authorized Network drop down to a different number on each they are now both recording. One is set to 23 and the other to 24. I have no idea what this setting does.

At this point both cameras are recording to the HDD on my Nas4Free setup.

I put the 5.0.2 firmware on yesterday. If they did do something to the NAS issues, it didn’t help. I haven’t been able to keep the HDD online for more then about a half to a day without having it fail. The only soultion I seem to have is to format the drive, but then all the data is gone. IDK if it’s my settings or what. So far very unhappy. Cameras are great as far as image quality. I’ll give it a few more days then maybe try a dedicated NAS box. Right now I’m running NAS4FREE on an old laptop

I have 2 DS-2CD2112 Cameras and a HP N54L running Ubuntu Server headless (ie no local KVM). The Ubuntu server can be configured/maintained by webadmin, but I tend to use a terminal (command line) over ssh from a Windows machine.

I installed NFS on the N54L and used a dedicated 1TB disk with a separate subdirectory for each camera, updated the camera firmware to V5.0.2 130805 and it all works well. I’m using iVMS-4200 on the Windows machine – which seems fine, although I haven’t figured it all out yet. You can playback multiple cameras at the same time in a multi-screen grid but I haven’t yet figured out how to synchronise them.

I got this working with a Raspberry Pi as my NAS with a 16GB USB stick for storage(Formatted NTFS, had issues with it mounting on reboot as ext4).

I have 2 DS-CD2032-I running 1080P/Medium Quality/15 FPS. I found the if I bumped these up I would start having some lag issues from the Pi. Both have the Raptor 5.0.2 Firmware.

I made a folder for each camera to save the videos in. When I only had one folder, I would get truncated videos for the same time period. One would start recording then the other camera would start, thus cutting off what the first was trying to record. So you need separate folders.
I have also been using the Android app which works really well for playback and live feed.

I find this works really well for me. The Cameras probably consume more power then the Raspberry Pi, but it’s better then having an old laptop or computer running all the time.

I’m having the same issue, but with NFS enabled on my MAC. It just becomes uninitialized after a reboot. No luck with FreeNFS on the PC either. Was about the purchase a NAS, but it sounds like it may be the camera?

Same issue with Synology DS212j.
Any network shortage (if camera trying to write at that moment, I suppose) causes switching to ‘uninitialized’ state. After ‘formatting’ everything is OK (but all recordings will be lost), till next stop.
As I understand, camera fall into panic if can’t access (with any reason) to nfs export (share), and it looks like a bug, beacuse nfs itself CAN solve problems with disconnecting (by their stateless nature). So it’s only Hik’s firmware bug.

Unfortunately this great feature so pretty unstable for using it for my customers. I’m sad.

This is a very late reply, but in case any of you are still getting updates on these comments…

I solved my Camera to Qnap NAS “uninitialized” issue by creating a new user on the NAS, just for the Hikvision camera – call it Hikivision if you like, and give it full permissions on the share/drive you want the camera to use.

Then set a per-user quota for that Hikivision user. I set it to 400gb, which is considerably smaller than my NAS free space. Immediately after, and since, I’ve had no NAS related issue.

Just so that everyone knows, I’ve got my recordings going back to a win 2008r2 box as a proof of concept and it just recorded from 2 cameras until the space ran out. Does anyone know of any nfs share quota monitoring tools? That would help immensley with this problem.

I did have to chmod 777 the nfs share, which was my last wrinkle before getting it working.
Remember to check the “exports” config file for authorizing the subnet as (rw).
I found this tutorial useful:http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/nfs.server

Now – it is only one camera feeding direct to the HD, but it works, and cost me only hardware that I had kicking around anyway…

I recently bought two Hikvision cameras and THOUGHT I could simply have them read and write to a HDD connected to my network. So I bought an adapter that turns a USB HDD into a network drive. Correct me if I am wrong, but I am starting to realize that I am going to need a dedicated PC running which I was hoping to avoid. My cameras cannot communicate with the HDD on my network. I can access the network drive from a Windows PC, no problem. After reading this thread, it looks like the file structure needs to be NFS and the adapter I bought does not have that type of file structure. My question is, am I stuck either buying a true NAS device, or using a dedicated PC to run something like FreeNAS to manage the HDD? This part was a rude awakening. I thought I had all the hardware I needed. By the way, the adapter I bought is a Cirago Network USB Storage Link+. Thanks for any insight.

Inexpensive NAS devices typically are made for Windows use only and use CIFS, a Window file sharing protocol. Cameras typically have some form of embedded Linux and Linux does not share the enthusiasm for CIFS that Bill Gates had. So when buying a NAS, make sure in the fine print it says will work with Linux and supports NFS. When I did my testing, I used a NAS, not a PC.

Hikvision product management realizes that CIFS is more popular so I’m hoping they will support this in one of their firmware upgrades.

Thank you for confirming. Would you be able to recommend a NAS enclosure that would do a decent job of storing up to four cams (storing motion only)? There is a pretty inexpensive Synology one for about $150. I just want to make sure I don’t make another mistake in another purchase. I simply want the most affordable solution that will do the job. Thanks again!

Synology makes NAS devices in various price ranges, mostly differentiated by the processor performance and number of drive bays. The operating system, DSM is the same as what I tested with. They don’t come with NFS pre-installed but they have sort of an app store where click on the NFS app and it downloads and installs, similar to what you may be used to on a smartphone.

Thanks for the tip. I will order the Synology DS211J. It has some good reviews. Even though I do have enough PC pieces laying around to build a dedicated server, I would rather have something with a smaller footprint along with an OS that is already built in. Thank you!

Great info. When you get time can you post an update? I found a way to run NFS on windows and save to the camera. It’s a free version of software as long as you register. It’s called hanewin NFS and can be found here.

I have two cameras saving to my windows machine as a backup method. I then use windows backup to save the folders that the cameras are saving their data to, on a NAS. This is much simpler and easier for folks who don’t understand NFS vs CIFS etc.

Well, I received my Synology DS212j NAS today and didn’t have much trouble getting my Hikvision cameras to record to it when they see motion. I did have to create two separate directories (on the same volume) for them to write to.

I have not been able to get the FTP function to work though. The camera software doesn’t have any fine settings for FTP (that I see). I wonder if anyone has had success getting it to FTP snapshots to a server, based on an alarm trigger?

Sorry for my poor english and don’t know if you have still the issue but I’ve been able to FTP to my synology.
The thing is that when you connect to Synology FTP you are not redirected to a default directory. Just do a try, use filezilla to connect to your synology and you will see that you have a list of directories where you can go but as you log in you are not in a writeable directoy.
The Hikvision FTP client doesn’t allow you to perform a “cd” (change directory) to the directory that you want. I’ve not tried to play with parent/child thing on the camera, there may be as well a solution here (but if you have severals cameras you may have to create several shares).

What I’ve done is (on the 107+ DSM 3.1, not checked in 4.x but it should be the same):
- Create a specific user/pwd for cameras
- Activate the home directory on the synology (in the user panel).
This create on the Nas a root folders named Homes and as many sub folders that you have users (log in admin to see the structure). When you log as user you will see a new folder home which in fact point to /homes/yourusername
- Then on the synology FTP setup screen, security parameters, check the checkbox to change the root directory of the camera user. This will allow the Hikvision when it connect to teh FTP to fall in a writable directory.
- Now you can go the FTP setup of the camera and choose a sub directory to write in (parent/child,…).

On my setup, if I want to see the pictures, I just have to go to /homes/camera-user-name/camera-name.
If you have severals camera and use the same FTP user for all, you should en up with something like this on the NAS :
/homes/camera-user-name/camera-name1
/homes/camera-user-name/camera-name2
…

I’ve as well successfully solved the NFS share issue (if you reboot the camera, you have to reformat the share) following comments made here (on a hikvision camera review).
Many thanks to the owner of this site for that :).

I was referring to the FTP function of the Hikvision camera, where you can FTP images from the camera to a server, automatically. My server requires a secure FTP connection and the camera software just gives you a basic FTP function, so the FTP fails. I have not been able to find a work around, but I would still like to.

When I save a video capture to my local hard drive (Win 7 PC) from the camera’s Playback function, it will not play in any of my video software. That is another issue I need to resolve. It’s probably because the mp4 video file is saved in a slightly different format than what Windows based software can read. Not sure.

Don’t now of any camera that has SFTP, but that would be a good feature to have. Is the purpose to FTP an image on a timed interval to a website? If that’s the case, there’s alternatives.

As for capturing video to your PC, I believe that only works if you do a manual snapshot or record, and yes, puts video in mp4 format, not native to Windows. Download VLC Player, free, open source, works great, you can set Windows to use that program automatically for that file type. VLC is one of those Swiss Army knife type tools, can stream video, can convert one video type to another, can play just about anything.

The purpose of doing the FTP is to capture a few images whenever the cameras see motion. Then, if a criminal notices the cameras and wants to burn the house down to destroy documented evidence (for example) there would be still images stored on a remote server. SFTP is becoming more of a standard, so it is unfortunate that it is not an option in the camera’s software.

I purchased the swann HD820 cameras and a poe. I was able to get it to work several ways…via the browser, blue iris and HIKvision’s client software. I haven’t gotten a NAS drive yet. Depending on the setup I have some questions.

Using the browser doesn’t have the ability to record automatically.

Using Blue Iris I need to leave the PC on (Not preferred). This way doesn’t require NFS NAS but I still need to have the PC on to record.

Does anyone know a way of recording without the PC being on all the time? I might as well get a standalone system from Swann or similar company. It appealed to me because there was no port forwarding and that the camera, poe and NAS were the only parts that needed to be powered all them time. I guess the PC is the brain like the standalone NVR and needs to be on.

If you record to NAS, clearly the NAS has to be powered on, but not any PC. I used a Synology NAS to do this. Also, one thing to consider with a NAS is you can have too many cameras, you’ll overload what it can do and lose recordings. For me, I found the sweet spot at about 4 3MP cameras of a different brand, after that it started losing recordings so we have two NAS for one camera cluster.

First of all, thanks for your incredible reviews and your incredibly useful posts!

I have 16 3MP Hik 2032 bullets (10fps) and am using BI to monitor on an i7 with no issues.

My question is whether a synology 8-bay (e.g., DS1813+) will be able to handle this throughput — the DS1813+ has 4 LAN ports so my question is whether you think this will be ok, or “overload” it as you mentioned in your post. Would appreciate your thoughts….

Anyone found a way to have the Hikvision DS-2CD2032 save files to a Buffalo Linkstation NAS. Are there any workarounds that are possible like formatting the NAS to NFS or maybe a FW update in the works to support CIFS/SMB NAS storage? Hikvision would sell a ton of units with a FW update to support this. I love the high resolution and clear images provided by this camera but it is not useful to me if it cannot utilize my existing NAS infrastructure.

Unfortunately, most consumer grade NAS devices rely on a Windows mount (CIFS protocol) and don’t have NFS protocol in their software. Some can be hacked by using telnet to connect to a Linux prompt and installing NFS, but that would require some familiarity with Linux. I did this on my WD MyBook Live NAS, but didn’t work properly with the camera even though I can mount to it from my Mac. I’m hoping with a future release of firmware they will support CIFS. I heard rumors of a 5.1 release in early 2014.

I had posted that I could not play the downloaded mp4 video files in my Windows 7 players, from the Hikvision cameras. The video did play in the VLC media player but I could not convert the video file to be able to play them in my Windows players. Then, I stumbled upon a player that can be downloaded from the Hikvision site and it has a built in function to convert the mp4 file to avi. I did that and now the avi file will play in my windows media player. Now I can do whatever I want with the video files. Success!

I made a login/pw for the camera in the WD interface, put in the info in the camera settings and it connected right up to the Public share and formatted it in about 20 minutes. It recorded and played back fine. I’m formatting a 250GB hard drive to plug into the MyCloud USB to see if it can mount to it as well. Right now it’s using the full 2TB, and there is no way I can see to make a quota in the WD software. It’s running Debian, but I’m not good enough with linux to change any of the settings (you can SSH into the box).

Just to add. I could not get the camera to record a hard drive connected to the MyCloud drive’s USB port. It connects and begins the format and eventually fails around 80-something percent. It wasn’t a big deal so I didn’t try and troubleshoot it much. The drive was split in 2 partitions which may have been a problem (but unlikely).

Thanks for the update, i plan on waiting a month or so to see if there are any new firware updates to address the issues with NAS. If not i am am going to buy the NAs drive you have and also either the lenovo ix2 or the tn-200 and see if i have any luck.

I just think for persons who only need 1 or 2 camers investing in a standalone NVR is prob a waste of money for most.

Server Address: 192.168.1.xxx (your clouds ip)
File Path: \Camera1
Then put in your username / password. I went to go look at mine and I see I used my normal login/pw for the cloud device. I thought I made one for the camera but I guess I didn’t.

If you have a second camera, you would make a new share called Camera2 or whatever. I just have the one camera so far, will be getting another sooner or later.

I run a dedicated PC as an NVR and live streaming server but, for now, have another Windows machine running NFS to record from the 820CAM. First, thank you for the write up and all of these comments – it made configuring Windows Server 2008 R2 and the Camera a task, not an odyssey. After the network share was full, new recordings overwrote the old.

I have a few questions:
1. Has anyone used the Hikvision iVMS-4200 software with the Swann cameras? Are they recognized?
2. Is updating the firmware to Hikvision V5.1.0 build 131202 as simple as using the web interface?
3. Can I revert to the Swann firmware easily?
4. Where can I get the Swann firmware? I’ve looked at the Swann site but, well, it stinks.
5. What VBR/CBR are people using? The default was 4096 kb/s, 5120 works ok, and 8192 causes stuttering problems in recorded video for me.

Yes, you’re right. I just like fixing things that aren’t broken :). The changelog from the Hikvision Europe site for the latest firmware is enticing.

I re-skimmed your review of the SWNHD-820CAM and noticed that you used iVMS from Hikvision to fiddle with the camera. That’s enough of an incentive. I’ve downloaded it and will try getting things running as time permits.

I have the hikvision DS-2CD2012-I and I’m trying to make it work with DLINK NAS-320, it has Network shares (NFS) setup but I cannot make the disk visible as online. I tried all kind of options but no luck.

I attached a usb drive to my router(trendnet 812dru).The camera online page was able recognize and format the drive with no problem. I tried take snapshots for a little while which work fine meaning it stores the images to the drive.

The issue is recording videos, I set the recording schedule as continuous and even tried motion detection but it shows space on the drive being used up but no recorded files can be found in playback nor going into the drive.

My question is did you have to do anything special with your synolgy drive and which model did you get?

I tried it with my Synology and no luck. Also tried it with a WD Mybook Live and no luck. I’m sure if they get good feedback, they’ll have a 5.1.1 release soon that will fix this. They have been pretty responsive and interested in the feedback.

I’ve got a tip in the forum, in order that teh camra records with NFS or CIFS (5.1) there can nothing be on the NAS. SO I did reformat my Netgear Duo, one volume, one single share on the top and it does record. I’ve tried before with directories on teh share and it did not work.

So what is weird, the camera software gave me the error that it failed to initialize. But if I look on my 2TB NAS, it is still creating files…

I have 20 datadir folders for my 2TB NAS, I only have 5 datadir folders for my 500GB NAS.

After it completes the 20 datadir folders on my 2TB NAS, it still wont say normal… So I really think its something to do with the disk size and their software.

I have 3 seperate NAS devices. Two are 2TB NAS devices, and one is 500GB. Only the 500GB NAS seems to work. Pretty lame considering I bought a high end NAS with Raid5 capability only to find out it will work with 500Gb or less drives.

I also am using Gigabit switches with Cat6, so I know its not a networking issue.

I am pretty sure its a time out issue with the software and the NAS. If It doesn’t complete in a specific time frame then it just shows as uninitialized. I think Hikivision needs to make that timeout longer for bigger drives.

*Edit*

I just emailed Hikvision and hope they pass this info along to the right team.
————————————————————————————————-

I wanted to say thank you for your cameras. They are the best quality cameras for the price and I would recommend them to everyone I know if your team could resolve the storage issue with your next firmware release.

When using the storage feature it looks like your datadir folders are created based off 100GB increments. IE: If I have a 500GB drive, your camera knows to create 5 Datadir folders on the specified NFS device.

I have 3 NAS devices all utilizing NFS on a Gigabit network with all devices using Gigabit network cards.

Two utilize 2TB drives and one utilizes 500GB drives.

The only NAS I can successfully get your cameras to work with is the 500GB NAS device. This seems to be due to a timeout limit set in the camera software.

Basically, the 2TB NAS device is using NFS. I can see where your camera creates the required 20 datadir folders based on my NAS size. It then tries to copy files to the NAS device. It gets to DataDir10 and then your camera software reports under the Progress section, “unable to initialize disk”.

I login to my NAS and the funny thing is your camera is still creating the files on my NAS device. It eventually creates all the required files but when I go back into the camera software it will never say “Normal” for the status.

I am a Computer Engineer by trade and work with enterprise class devices and have done extensive testing with your cameras and multiple NAS devices. It seems to be a timeout issue with the software not creating the files in time for your camera software to do its health check.

I would be willing to help assist your team with testing. I have 3 NAS devices and I have swapped the 500GB drives into each NAS one by one and they all work fine if the drives are only 500GB. If I try a known good NAS device and swap the 500GB drives out with 2TB drives the camera system will not complete the process.

Sorry for the lengthy email. I know your company is busy, but this would be a great feature to start supporting bigger drives as most people are using 2TB+ drives today.

I have shared this information with other hikvision camera owners over at this forum.

Does the Hikvision IP cameras “HFIPC-2342F-IW” and “HFIPC-2352F-IWS” support continually recording to the SD card or to a NFS? I am interested in these models for my home. I used a Thecus N4200eco NAS for storage. Thanks

I have had the 2CD2032-i for a week and have used Blue Iris and the web software. If I am correct with the supplied software you cannot record to the local computer when triggered by motion. It has to record to a NAS. Can I create a NAS on my desktop?

This works now with v5.1 software using a Bufallo Linkstation. The trick is you need to delete all files from the NAS before you go through the procedure for “formatting” the NAS. Also use the “share” folder directly off the root. I can record continuously or just on motion to the NAS. After setting this up it is easy to then allow other cameras to store to the same NAS (for example Vivotek or Trendnet). I would like to record continuously but also get an alert on the timeline when motion occurs but so far I don’t see how this can be done. Is it possible to record contnuously but also have an indicator show where motion activations have occurred? I do this with Blue Iris.

I used schedule 40 PVC and painted it to match the house. The sun never hits the side of the house where I ran the PVC so it should last a long time. If it’s in direct sun, there is a special type you can get so it will hold up.

I purhased a Synology DS214 for my Hikvision DS-2CD2032-I camera.
I updated the firmware in the camera. I set up a share volume. But I cannot get the Hickvision configuration for the Synology NAS to work. After setting up the info in the NAS tab, when I go to the Storage Management tab the HDD is shown as “Offline” and cannot be selected for formatting.
Any ideas about this?
Thanks.
John

There’s a bug in the latest firmware, 5.1 that breaks this, so only work with 5.0 of the firmware. Someone posted a hack here to make it work and people tried it and it works. There’s new Hikvision firmware, 5.1.2 on the cusp of being released, hoping that fixes the issue.

I finally got Hikvision configuration to recognize my Synology DS214 as an online NAS. I had failed to give the shared folder proper permissions. I “formatted” it and everything seems to be working properly. Now I have a couple of questions that reveal my lack of knowledge about NAS in general.

1). The two 2 GB HDs in my Synology DS214 are set up as Hybride RAID SHR giving me a total capacity of about 1829 GB. I don’t want to use all of this capacity for surveillance video recording. Is there a way to limit the size to which that shared folder can grow?

2). How do you delete old surveillance video footage from the Synology unit to keep it from taking up all the available space?

I know these questions are beyond the scope of the subject matter in this post. But I would appreciate any help you might give me.
Thanks.
John

When it reaches the % limit you set on the camera, it should delete old files to make room for new. I don’t know of anyway to share that file system. From what people say that got it to work with multiple cameras is they created separate partitions.

I would sure like to know where I can set the % limit on the camera, to delete old files. Last time, once the NAS filled up, I went and manually deleted the folders on the NAS and reformatted each camera. What a pain. I have not figured out how to have the camera automatically delete files.

The camera works fine with the 5.1 firmware, right from the start. It’s the additional options that are not showing up. I thought the patch fixed the disk allocation problem. But what about the additional options that are supposed to appear for 5.1? I wonder why they are not showing. The interface looks identical to the 5.0 interface.

Well, once the new interface appeared, I was not able to view or record the video, so I went back to the old firmware. The patch instructions weren’t detailed enough for someone with limited server experience. I will wait until they get the bugs out of it.

Still though, the percentages for still images and video need to both add to 100%, and the disk space can’t be modified. The only way I can think of managing disk space is to trick the camera into deleting video by setting the video percent low and the still image percent high, as I don’t save many still images. In theory, it seems it would force the video to delete sooner because it thinks it needs all that space for the stills. I am trying to manage disk space with 5 cameras. I have different directories on my NAS, but not different partitions. Thus, each camera thinks it has the remaining disk space all to itself.

They broke this in the 5.1 version of the firmware. There’s a patch of the code if you are savvy enough to do it. I wrote a thread about it HERE. My article was written based on the 5.0 version which did work.

I have setup 4 cams with one NAS, one partition, 4 shares, working now 10 days without problem.
Create one share (NFS) for each camera and define it in Storage/NAS aka file path. In storage management you will see HDD as uninit., but then you need to format it (it is not really formating). And finally apply pattch to davinci, as described earlier. Each camera stores recording to its share.

I’m thinking about buying 3 or 4 Hikvision cameras and a switch with PoE, dedicated for the cameras. I already have a Synology 212+ Nas and a home security system. I would like to arm the cameras when the the home security system is armed. That is, when we are at home and the security system is disarmed, the cameras should not take any pictures. Using the camera configuration where one configure time schedule for recording does not work very well in our case. So, I was thinking about controlling the power for the switch via the home security system. When we arm the security system the power is on for the switch (and the cameras via PoE). And when we disarm the power is cut to the switch. Recording should be done to the NAS either via built in NVR capabilities or via Surveillance system. Do anyone see any problems with this solution? What happens when you cut the power to the cameras and then apply it again?

For those trying to get CIFS to work with the latest firmware, I was experiencing the issue where the Format operation did not work. I finally figured out that it does not seem to work with NTFS partitions. It works for me when I used a newly formatted FAT32 partition. I just split an existing partition on an old computer into multiple smaller FAT32 partitions, and I’m pointing each camera to a separate empty partition – working so far.

Hi, I am using one for test with a Zyxel NSA310. The big trouble is when the NAS unit is going to “sleep” (turn off hdd after x minutes). The NAS has WoL capability, but this cam cannot see it properly (status: uninitialized). Same thing it’s happening after the camera’s reboot.
I think I will return it.

After first reboot, it seemed that nothing
changed (about the NFS issue), but I rebooted
it again and a new version of WebComponents
downloaded (used only Chrome).
Then, new resolutions appeared and choices
(at Live View).
The NFS issue didn’t solved for me (at NSA310),
after “formatting”, the status remained “uninitialized”.
Yeap, a big step down !
Ok, the good news: I am able to choose between
NFS and CIFS/SAMBA, so I stared to dig into it.

I used the USB stick with SAMBA share from one of my
routers (NFS didn’t work onto it) and I formated it.
Next thing: even the share was public (no need user/pass),
I was forced by this camera’s new firmware to enter it
(so I entered the root user&pass from the router).
It worked. The camera created the files structure
(now I don’t see in that partition the old folders/files,
e.g. tftp/ftp folders, but doesn’t matter).
I setup the motion detection and I started to capture.

When you use NFS, settings are (example):
Server address: 192.168.1.20
File path: /i-data/309077/nfs/camera

When I downloaded the videos from the router’s stick
to the pc’s hdd (from “Download FilePlayback”, with Chrome),
the speed was 1115 KBytes/s.
A little bit low, but notice that the stick has
three partitions, (/swap /opt /disc0_3).
The router has only 32MB Ram, so more than 4MB from
the swap were used in addition.
Smbd used 23% from the router’s CPU (266Mhz).

Now, if I reboot the camera, the router, or both,
the status is “Normal”, so the camera can write onto
the router’s stick when this is available.

The only issue what I see now is:
if I want to erase the old captures from that disc
(using camera’s software, from browser),
where can I find such function ?
Btw: I don’t want to erase these files manually.

I have a hikvision DS-2CD2532F-IWS and is using a SD Card.
When I download recordings from the SD Card it tells me that it is downloaded but I cannot see anything in the folder it is supposed to download to. I am downloading to my laptop running win8.1. – any idea what to be done?

If I don’t have a NAS, what capabilities will I get with a basic camera? Can I view recordings and download/export them? I’m willing to run NFS on my PC for downloading footage on demand if I need to do that.

You can get one of their cameras with an SD card slot and record/play to it. The other choices are to just run their free Hikvision iVMS4200 PCNVR to record on a PC or use the free Milestone XProtect Go which is much better.

I have been pulling my hair out trying to get my NAS to work with my Hikvision cameras. Hoping you could help me? I was able to get the right format (I think) for the file path for the nas (an LG NAS 1tb). The camera acknowledges the capacity of the NAS in the storage management tab but there is no free space and i can’t edit any of the quota setting. The webpage also says the status of the NAS is uninitialized. Hoping you can point me in the right direction.

I have never installed that version, but yes, it requires a dedicated drive or partition. You can also try Milestone XProtect Go, it’s free for 8 cameras and 5 days recording, but much better than iVMS4200. There’s a new iVMS5200 that is client/server, better architecture, but have not been able to get it yet.

Thanks mate, that helped!
I’ ll install the software and when the DS-2CD2432F-IW 3MP arrive I am going to record to the sd-card first and I am willing to buy the WD purple series when I get more ip-cam to work.

I am planning to install 4 cameras ( 2 indoor + 2 out door) , would you please advise me about all items in details that need to be ordered ( SW & Hw).
Note : I want to access all of them thru mobile ( remotely)

Search through my site and look at Dahua or Hikvision cameras as they offer the best value. The easiest thing to do is get the Dahua or Hikvision NVR which has 4 PoE ports. You just plug the cameras in and it automatically configures them, pretty easy. You’ll need to buy a hard drive for it and also connect it to a monitor or PC with HDMI port. Accessing it through your mobile phone is no problem as each vendor provides Android or IOS mobile apps for free.

I’m trying to set up my camera (DS-2CD2732F-I(S) V5.1.2 build 140116) so as it will record video on my nfs server. I set up my nfs server with the following options /video * (rw,insecure,no_root_squash) and can connect to it either with my linux machine or my mac. When I configure the the camera and reboot it, it seems it does not recognize it as when I go in the storage tab, it is not there… I did a tcpdump on the nfs server, I see that the camera tries to connect to it (rpcbind request on port 111) but then it does not continue through and retries every ~30 secs. On my other machines, I can connect and create directories and files without any problem. Any ideas what could be the problem?

A word of caution, 5.2 has less functionality than previous versions, for example, they removed the onvif/snapshot, face detection, line traversal and ftp. What’s worse is they made is so once you go to 5.2, you can not install older firmware. They also included some anti-hacking measures so the fix some people used to fix the writing to NFS or CIFS mount can no longer be applied as it bricks the cameras. Honestly, the best version is 5.1, it has better white balance for better color accuracy, you can apply the patch for the NFS issues and it’s a stable release. It’s what we use on our commercial installs. If you get camera with 5.2, you can install an earlier firmware using the tftp method documented on the Hikvision website.

I currently have 2 x 2032 and 2 x 2132 (V5.1.6 build 140412) that I would like to record to a single HDD using a HP Microserver with FreeNAS. Before I leap into this, can you please clarify what would be the best approach? Would you recommend creating individual partitions for each camera on the HDD, then create individual NFS shares and then link these to the camera?

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to use these damn things. I have a pair of the Swann SWNHD-820CAM cameras from Costco. Felt like throwing them out a couple times. I guess I should have read the entire manual from front to back.

I did learn a lot from the reviews and all the comments on this site. So thanks to everyone here for all the help.

Here are some somewhat random thoughts and comments.

Cameras are running 5.1.2 build 140504. I asked Swann for newer or older firmware and they denied having anything else.

The hikvision iVMS-4200 software on the mac works great with the cameras. The iPad and iPhone equivalent apps also work. My 3rd generation iPad worked with iOS 7 but after I upgraded to iOS8 it doesn’t load anymore. My wife’s first gen iPad works fine, although she hasn’t updated to iOS 8 yet. My iPhone 5s with iOS8 works great with the same app. The iOS app is called iVMS-4500. You can also get a plugin that works in Safari and Chrome from hikvision.

My DNS-323 worked as an NFS server for awhile, until it didn’t. I am having some hard drive issues with that device though. I have now am using a Debian server running NFS with DEDICATED partitions for each camera and so far so good. Until I created the dedicated partitions I couldn’t get the “format” to work at all.

After a week or so monkeying around with the cameras testing stuff they started to create ethernet framing errors (FCS errors). I am using a 12 port Juniper POE switch (I am a network guy at work.) This really pissed me off because I am supposed to know what I am doing. I was installing permanent cabling when these errors started to show up and I assumed it was my terminations or I ran the cables to close to power or a kink in the cable or something I should know not to do. I couldn’t find anything. The errors were also killing performance and making the cameras hard to use. Then I reset everything on one camera to default (except the ip addressing) and the errors went away. A quicker way is to export the config and reset the settings then import that file back in. If you have network issues or suspect network issues, DO THIS. All my network errors disappeared as soon as I did this.

I have it emailing motion detection alerts. Check out the advanced settings. You can change sensitivity between day and night and setup multiple areas for sensors.

Winter is coming and it should go below -30C at some point I will try to let everyone know how that goes. The cameras feel warm when they are running but you have know idea about -30 or lower until you have lived it.

I can do some testing of various frame rates and quality levels to see how much bandwidth is generated. The default settings generate a consistent 3.0-3.2 Mbps bandwidth to the NAS. 1080p@30fps.

Hmmm, thats all that I can think of at the moment. I might buy a few more cameras. I like them now.

iVMS4500 does not yet work with IOS 8 on iPads and Hikvision is aware. -30 is pretty cold but that’s -22F and had at least 2 people in the upper mid-west in the U.S. report no problems at that temperature last winter. Swan as with other OEM’s is going to be far back behind the native Hikvision cameras, just a downside to OEM versions. You are not missing much as 5.1.6 was pulled for some problems and 5.2.0 has less features than 5.1.6. Good to hear you got an NFS server working. As for PoE switches, I’ve run through a few including a Cisco 8 port gige switch that was flaky. I’m replaced it with a 24 port Netgear gigabit desktop switch that has 12 PoE ports and that’s been holding up and is quieter than others and runs off 120VAC (no power brick or wall wort).

Excellent news regarding the iPad app. I have been watching for an update.

It seems the OEMs should be avoided, if possible. Wish I knew that sooner but you live and learn.

I graph all my network traffic with observium which uses snap to collect the data. I hope the consumer grade PoE switches support snmp but that could be rare.

I went looking for the older firmware (5.0.x) based on the reports here that said it was more stable on NFS. After I changed the partitions it has been stable so no need to downgrade now or upgrade anytime looking forward.

The only excitement was around 5.1.6 which adds motion detect features like face detection and line traversal detection. I see more analytics capabilities like this being added in more brands of cameras over time.

I’ve gone through so many specs trying to find a decent 8 channel NVR capable of motion detected recording (for Hivision cameras) … there’s always a give and take, right? … Spotted that the Hikvision 8 channels are limited/rated to 40 Mbps thorough, with Dahua’s at 160 Mbps. From your experience with various brands out there, which NVR would you say has the best value (capable of motion detected recording for Hikvision) out there, without going to a NAS box? Sometimes it’s not even a matter of price, like buying a proper hand tool, you just want to make sure it’ll serve you and not fail when the times comes to perform. Thank you, as always.

In trying to trace this limitation, it’s not that camera ‘x’ has instructions to send [region] based motion to NVRs ‘a’ & ‘b’ but not NVR ‘c’ … I can’t make much sense past that an NVR simply decodes what data it receives and then displays it … am I incorrect? So what limits the majority of consumer based NVRs out there or even ones peaking to a grand from being able to support motion detection from some cameras but not all?

It seems that the market for a solid, all-round-functional NVR really don’t emerge until you necessarily reach the high-channel ‘designed for airports and shopping malls’ tier. I don’t know .. my search for something thorough came up questionable. What would you point at as a solid, performance NVR or series to consider?

Milestone makes a very good 8 channel NVR, but list price is $2,999, street price is pretty close to that, if not higher. Don’t know what you are trying to do. Do you want a camera to record to 2 NVR’s?

Record only based on motion footage, running at 3-5MP, 25-30 FPS, bitrate of 6144-8192; not be held back by a mere 40 Mbps on one end, nor compatibility issues on another end, have fluid playback capability.

Yeah, the 7700 were the only ones I considered, because at that price you might as well ensure something, especially if and in a LAN environment. But the 7700 doesn’t make sense because it keeps the numbers relative per port. I think that was overlooked by them in the design. The Dahua 52xx and 72xx series can record motion detected footage as stated on their website. These NVRs at least run 3x-4x the thoroughput. I’m looking at another two that run up the 380 Mbps for the same price range. As far as I understand it boils down to the software on the NVR and it’s compatibility with Onvif 2.2 plus. The search continues.

I have the DS-2CD2032, and I would like to know if it is possible to record both on SD card and NAS? Also, I’m using the face detection in my current firmware, can someone confirm that this feature was removed from the new 5.2 firmware ?

Check the CPU utilization during times when it’s detecting motion and writing to disk. You are likely using Zoneminder which is CPU intensive. If you are hitting the wall CPU wise, it will drop frames (freeze video). You can try running Hikvision iVMS4200 PCNVR for Windows which is way more CPU efficient and free. I run Milestone XProtect on Windows which has a free version with limitations called GO or a pay version without the limitations that is also very efficient. For example, I run 10-12 cameras (depending on what I’m reviewing) at a time on my Intel NUC and all my recordings are smooth at 3MP at 20fps.

i been trying to save recordings to a 25TB NAS. but its showing 0.00MB of free space. i tried formating and it still dont work. heres the screenshot. its a Thecus 5550 NAS on raid-5 with the latest firmware. i also updated the camera to the latest 5.16 firmware. i spent hours trying to figure this out and nothing is working. i tried both NFS and Samba.

The issues your NAS size. It does not like large NAS and there can’t be any other files on the same disk/partition. You’ll have to create smaller partitions and provide the shares for that. Each cameras has to have it’s own disk or partition.

thanks for the quick reply. do you know if i have to rebuild the RAID? since its a 25TB NAS, it took several days to build the NAS and whatever is on there now will be gone. it wouldnt make sense if i have to re-build the RAID everytime i add a partition since what if i want to add an additional camera next time…

I would you would have to redo it. There’s a firmware hack floating around that changes the quotas to allow it to work, but still requires separate partitions for each camera. Is this a QNAP or Synology NAS? If so, they have surveillance camera software that runs on the NAS that works pretty well. I reviewed Synology Surveillance Station about a year ago and has since improved and they give you the first 2 camera licenses free.

Can you set a quota for users, or for each “share” on the NAS? That’s what got NAS recording working for my Qnap NAS. I created a user just for the camera, on the NAS, and set a quota for that user at 350gb. Immediately after formatting that share/drive in the camera’s admin scree it showed ~350gb free space. And it’s worked well since.

There is no such thing as requiring to have seperate partitions for each camera… You just need seperate NFS or CIFS shares. How do I know? I have all my cameras running off the same 3TB RAID partition that I host CIFS shares off of. The only difference is I am publishing the folders out to the cameras using NFS. I have tested with both NFS 2.0 and NFS 3.0 and this works flawlessly. I have 3 NAS devices and backup to all of them at once without issues. The only weird thing that doesn’t work as intended is the deletion of the backups once the disk shows full…. This is a camera software issue (5.0), not a NAS issue. So in order to get around the deletion not working I have a cron job setup to delete backups over 30 days old. Works great!

I have a Thecus 5500, Western Digital Live NAS and a home grown FREENAS device. They all work fine, my largest is 4TB and my smallest is 2TB.

I am Server Engineer by trade, so some things not all people may get to work, but it is possible and not super hard if your somewhat technical/motivated.

The firmware hack that someone wrote was to get around the issue of disk/partition size. If the disk is say 1TB, but 3 cameras are sharing the disk/partition as separate SMB shares or NFS directories, each camera thinks it has 1TB and won’t delete files when the disk is full. Having a separate disk or partition for each also mitigates this issue, but is more tedious to setup.

Hi,
I was reading your article “Quick Start Guide of Hikvision IP Camera & Synology NAS. I have the Synology DS213J and a Hikvision DS-2CD2132-l. I am unable to get it to record video. The Drive shows “Normal” after formatting, but when I try to record motion it doesn’t work and then I go back and find the drive says uninitialized. Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Mike

When I tested it, it worked with 5.0 firmware, but has since changed. What it’s expecting is an empty share but if you have more than one, it gets weird on calculating free space, so several readers have put a share per disk partition.

I got it working. I had an extra USB external hard drive that I plugged into the back of my Synology unit. I formatted it and was able to record motion video on it. Thanks for the great article. Now if I end up buying another camera I won’t be able to set it up with the same drive? What would be my options?

Not the ideal solution if you have several cameras. You don’t need a separate drive, but a separate partition. People got it to work on a single drive/partition by defining different shares, but each camera thinks it has the entire drive, so it will fill up and stop working, but, some people wrote scripts, like a shell script on Synology to delete older files.

Hi, I have 3 cameras with 5.2 English version firmware on them.
I tried to record to WD My Book Live using CIFS.
Created share folder, and username/password.
in camera’s config, added NAS info (IP, Path etc) tested and it was successful.
then under ‘storage management’, it shows the drive as uninitialized.
I click on format, it formats it with no problem and status change to normal (I checked the share and it created the folders)

but it cannot record. if I click away to another section of config and click back the status changes to offline or uninitialized. what can be the problem?

Read through the responses to see what’s worked. Some people have had good luck with the Synology brand. Some people got it working on USB drives attached to routers as some have built in NAS capabilities, can’t get much cheaper than that.

can you please post the details steps on how you set it up?
I want to follow them exactly and see if I can get any result.
mine is 1 TB my book live (older black version) not sure if this make any difference.

Google live book default ssh password. You can install nfs on a live book and make it work. That’s the only way I have been able to get mine to record. Also the live book is much slower network transfer rates. So the initialization phase takes longer than most other NAS devices. Just be patient, it will work.

is this fix/hack only for My book Live? how about My cloud?
If My Cloud works with CIFS (without installing nas) I prefer to buy a My Cloud rather than void 3 years warranty on my book live (still have more than 2 years on it)

You should be able to, you can make separate folders for each camera. But I’m thinking it could be a problem when the drive eventually fills up. There is no way, that i see in the basic WD UI, to give folders quotas. Its linux based and I’d bet you could do it if you knew how.

I am not sure if that was the reason but I had some movies in the public folder of WD. I deleted all of them and boom it was working.
I created 3 users with 3 private shares, went to each camera, format it and all of are working and recoding to WD.
Please note that I was not able to split the space between 3 so all of them see the whole storage as theirs. right now it filled only 30 GB out of 1 TB so i don’t know what happens when drive is full. I will see and post back again.
the only thing is, how we can delete old recording from NAS?
If I can do so, will delete old data from time to time so the drive will never be full.

From my understand is yes, you’ll have to manage the space if you have more than one camera. If you can telnet into the NAS which I’ve done before, not that hard, You can probably write a quick 1-2 line Linux script that runs say once a day to delete files over a certain age or even just schedule the command in cron if the NAS has cron running. For example, use this command to list files over 30 days old to test if that’s what you want – find /share/directory/* -mtime +30 -exec ls {} \; if you want to delete them, change ls to rm, find /share/directory/files* -mtime +30 -exec rm {} \; You can get fancy and get the space remaining and if it’s under a certain amount, delete the oldest date and loop until you reach a threshold.

Please, is there anybody having 2032 (V5.2) working properly with WD My Cloud as the motion detection recording storage ???
If so, please me give me detailed instructions how to set it.
I spent hours but still the same issue: SMB/CIFS connection test succeed, formated well, but the status changes to unitialized after a while or reboot.
Any help would be very appreciated.

I have 2032 (V5.2) and working fine with WD my book live. it should be the same for my cloud.
what i did, delete all the share folders from WD except for public.
delete all files in public, it means the drive is empty.
create new share folder and user and give the user access to that folder.
On camera, under nas, use SMB/CIFS and make sure the new user can connect (test)
under storage, select drive and format.
if you have successful format and status stays as “normal” the WD is set up properly.
to test enable schedule and set all days to continuous recording. after few minutes check playback, you should see it is recording…
if all good, then play around to get your motion detection recording working.

I have the Hikvision DS-2CD2032-I, it’s working fine on motion record with my WD MyCloud. I just checked the firmware: Firmware Version V5.1.0 build 131202.

On the My Cloud I have a share named Camera. Media serving is on, public access is on. I have an user account made for the camera.

On the camera for NAS I have the type as NAS, mounting type SMB/CIFS. The server address is the My Cloud which is on a static IP of 192.168.1.100. The file path is /Camera. Username/pw is filled for the My Cloud account.

Record Schedule is set to Enable Record Schedule checkmarked. Under Edit I have it set to All Day Motion Detection for the whole week.

Under Events I have Enable Motion Detection checkmarked. Under Linkage Method I have only Trigger Channel checkmarked.

Thanx very much, DirkDaring !!
I have set all the same way, the only difference is the firmware. The mine is V5.2.0 build 140721.
Probably I should look for a possibility of the firmware downgrade to your V5.1.0 build 131202. Any advices would be welcome !!

Does any one else have any problems with camera time drifting. I have 4 of the hikvision turret cameras and I have them set to use the ntp time server time.nst.gov and recording to a disk shared through my router and all works greats recording, each camera has it s own partition. But the problem is that two of the cameras drift off time by about an hour. Anyone seen this before?

1. Use Windows + iVMS-4200 and let the software handle the recording (motion) and save to hd.
2. Convert the said hardware to Freenas/Nas4free, enable the motion features of the 2132′s and tinker around the NAS to work correctly with the 2132′s.
3. Use Linux, install NFS, enable the motion features of the 2132′s and tinker around the NFS of the Linux box to work correctly with the 2132′s.

You should be able to use an inexpensive Windows mount (CIFS) NAS. That would have the lowest power consumption. You can also run iVMS4200 on an Intel NUC which is very small and very low power consumption and way better than using a NAS for recording. I use a i5 version of the NUC for currently 10 cameras, no problems.

Can these cameras connect (NAS) to my server running Windows Essentials 2012 R2? It would be great if I could as this server is already running 24/7 and I wouldn’t want to have another device running 24/7. I currently have 32GB cards in all the hikvisions.

Thank you very much for the post above. I found it to be very useful. I’m thinking of using NAS to record two Hikvision cameras that I’ve installed at my house. At the end of your post, you mentioned “cheap off the shelf $100 NAS and start using it to record”. I’ve searched around but didn’t find any NAS that can support NFS for around $100. Is there one that you can recommend? Thank you for your time.

I finally got this figured out and am able to record with Hikvision’s build-in NVR. However, one thing I am not able to figure, when I download clips, where do they go? I’m not able to find them anywhere on my computer.

Hi there, Thanks for all the info, I was banging my head against a wall trying to get my camera’s to record to a NAS. But now I have another issue.

I have 3 POE cameras which are connected to a POE switch, The POE switch is connected to my router. I am running iVMS-4500 on Android Samsung S5. I am using the HiDDNS function to view my cameras remotely. When I view them I seem to get the camera over my garage appear 3 times, even though my backyard and sideway camera details have been entered correctly.

I have tried giving each camera a different login incase it was getting confused as to which camera it was looking for, but it hasn’t helped and it’s driving me nuts!

That is weird. I’ve only used iVMS4500 to test it out to prove it works and it certainly works where I get one display per camera, both on my iPhone 5s and Samsung Galaxy S4 (which probably has the same Android software as the S5). Check your port forwarding to make sure you are using different sets of port numbers for each camera. For example, you may say use port 10080, 10554, and 18000 for the IP address of camera 1, 11080, 11554, 18001 for the IP address of camera 2 and 12080, 12554, 18002 for the IP address camera 3. Then make sure you use the different port numbers in the app, don’t let it default to anything.

Please can I confirm does the DS-2CD2332-I have this NVR like feature built in? Also when this camera is recording to a NAS share can the live view direct to the camera still be used for example viewing from my iPhone?

Great article you have here! I’ve just got my first Hikvision DS-2CD2032 I running v5.25. I’m only running one camera currently but may add another later.
My plan is to use a new Raspberry Pi 2 as a NAS running a 1tb drive. Has anyone tried recording onto a Pi as a Nas?

You can use a computer with Ubuntu with Samba or NFS, but iVMS4200 PCNVR is a far better idea if you have multiple cameras. Imagine if you had 4 cameras, you have to log into each, find the same point in time to see activity, no syncing of playback. Just too cumbersome. If you have only 1-2 cameras then NAS makes sense.

I created a NFS mount on my UBUNTU computer. I also added this NFS mount in the NAS settings of the DS-2CD2032-I. I got connection and started “formating”. Took 10 miunutes. I could see the directories my camera created in the folder its mounted to.

After that i set up “all day” recording”

But my camera still shows uninitialized and no video is recorded. I also tried to reboot the camera, but stil uninitialized status.

For some reason it can’t handle large file systems. It won’t work with say a 1TB hard drive. Some people have created smaller disk partitions or put quotas on their NAS share and made them smaller. I don’t know what this limit is, but 50GB for sure will work and 1TB won’t, so somewhere in between.

deejaa – Yes, you need to install the LAMP server (linux, apache, mysql and php) before you can install Zoneminder. It doesn’t have to be a Ubuntu Server, you can even use Ubuntu Desktop and then use terminal to follow the steps on the link I gave you.

Thanks for the link to the beta version of iVMS for linux. I’ll try it out this weekend.

I have a DS-2CD2032-I running V5.2.5 build 141201. I’ve purchased a 3TB WD MyCloud NAS device however once the drive is formatted and records for 30secs-minute the drive shows offline then uninitialized. I’m more than happy with the camera however I think I will return both the camera and NAS due to being unable to record to the NAS.

You can record to NAS, just that each share has to be small as there’s a size limit on the disk. Some have partitioned disks to make them smaller, some where able to use quotas to each share to make them appear smaller. If you return them, consider Axis that has “edge” storage that lets you use a NAS to record, but not as conveniently as Hikvision in that you’ll need their ACC Windows program to set it up and view the recordings. Mobotix is the only that I’ve used that worked as described for this functionality.

I can confirm that setting a user quota to 350gb –for a new Hikvision user I created, just for the camera to use– on my Qnap NAS fixed my “uninitialized” issue and camera to NAS recording is working well.

Individual video files can be play from the NAS on my PC with something like VLC. But there will be hundreds of files, at least, to sort through, open and play. I’d like to point iVMS-4200 to the NAS and peruse the recorded video as you would through the camera’s NVR functionality.

Wow, I looked for hours and didn’t find that. Thanks for posting. I tried it but as I’m using Windows virtualization on my Mac, I wasn’t able to navigate to my NAS from the program. I’ll take your word for it that it doesn’t work, though.

I’ve tried VLC and there’s no audio on my playback where there should be (and as there is when I use the camera interface for playback). I checked the audio stream setting in VLC, and everything looks fine. So I’m not sure what’s going on there. Someone else pointed me to Hikvision’s VSPlayer download; it works as VLC should (and I guess does for most) but it’s a little slow and freeze prone.

It’d even be helpful if we could use another Hikvision camera to playback other Hikvision created files in the cameras NVR interface. But that seems even less possible. I suppose for now I’ll have to give up on this. Each camera’s stored files seem like they’re very closely tied to that very camera.

I have been using a DS-2CD2732F IS with iVMS 4200 under a desk Windows PC recording to a Synology DS214+ NAS with great results -(more cameras to follow soon).

I am also using iVMS 4500 on an IPad (original model iOS 5.1.1)for live view and remote playback away from home. This also works great and is even easier to navigae than the iVMS 4200.

I would like to log into the camera and modify the configuration from the IPad to view for example setting up motion detection and be able to observe the analytics live with the IPad in my hand. I can log into the camera OK and alter the settings but I cannot get any live images, NVR type playback or view the image in the configuration screens because the IPad does not seem to have a plug loaded. The image screens display the message No Plug In Detected.

I contacted Hikvision support who advised there was no plugin for IPad which seems a bit of an omission. Does anyone on here have any experience of achieving this with some sort of workaround.

It is OK, I have a cam with 5.2.5. fw, but I would like to use the IVMS-4200 PCNVR on my desktop.

It is running on my desktop and I would like to access it remotely.

The strange is that it is working successfully with IVMS-4500 Android app (Live View & Playback as well), but is not working via browsers. I do not understand it because the PCNVR is the same only the access methods are different.